The Prophet's ﷺ Permission to Write Down Hadith

The Question That Bent a Century

In the summer of 1890, Ignaz Goldziher published in Halle a second volume of his Muhammedanische Studien, and with that book he laid the foundation stone for what would resound for a century through the Western university as the standard reading of the Hadith. His thesis was sharp and brief. The Prophet ﷺ, he wrote, had forbidden that his sayings be written down. Whatever the Muslims of the second and third centuries after the Hijra possessed, then, in the way of thousands of transmitted traditions could not possibly go back to the generation that had known him. The Hadith, he concluded, was a later construction. Pious, partly useful in law, but historically unreliable.

A century later, in the benches of a British doctorate at the University of Cambridge, an Indian scholar set one single question against that whole edifice. What if the source Goldziher had put forward for his principal proof said, in reality, the opposite. What if the tradition he cited as the Prophet’s ﷺ prohibition was, in the sources themselves, immediately surrounded by dozens of other traditions reporting the reverse. What if the foundational reading itself stood crooked. That scholar was Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami ﵀, and in Studies in Early Hadith Literature he laid the building blocks of Goldziher’s thesis one by one back on the table, and turned them over in the light.

The preceding part of this series followed the Quran. We saw how the revelation began in the cave of Hira, how Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ and the other scribes of the revelation fixed the verses on leather and on palm-leaf stalks, how Abu Bakr ﵁ had the first mus’haf assembled after Yamamah, how Uthman ﵁ brought the definitive codification into being. From its first verse, in verse four of Surah Al-'Alaq, the Quran had already been announced as a written book. Alladhī 'allama bi-l-qalam. Who taught by the pen.

In this new part we open a second file. No longer the revelation itself, but the words, deeds and silent approvals of the man to whom the revelation was entrusted. The Sunna of the Prophet ﷺ. The Hadith. And the first question that stands in our way here is the same question Goldziher raised before the whole Western academy in 1890: was this ever written down, in his time, in his presence, with his permission.

The answer, as Al-Azami demonstrates, is not merely yes. It is a yes attested through so many independent channels that the opposing position cannot be sustained without assuming a later fabrication of an entire library of traditions. The Hadith was written down from the beginning. Not by everyone, not always, not systematically. But written down it was, in the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ himself, at his own command, sometimes from his own dictation. And on that permission, on that first uktub, rests everything that the centuries thereafter would bring.

Goldziher and the Second Century

To understand what is at stake in this opening question, one must briefly restore the orientalist’s framework. Goldziher, and after him Joseph Schacht, James Robson, and in a certain sense also A.J. Wensinck and Alphonse Mingana, shared a working method. They distrusted the entire Arabic transmission of sources as an instrument for the first century. The isnad, the chain of transmission that the Muslim scholar uses to trace every saying back to its origin, was in their eyes an invention of the second century. Before that lay, as they believed, an open sea. A time in which the believers freely attributed, freely invented, freely allowed traditions to arise in order to settle current legal or theological disputes.

In that reading, the prohibition on writing Hadith served them well. If the Prophet ﷺ had forbidden writing, then everything that later appeared in written form had to postdate him. And if everything that later appeared in written form postdated him, then there was no written control over what had been added to the traditions between his death and the time of Imam Malik ﵀ in Medina. The argumentative construction was complete. The prohibition was the hinge on which the whole scepticism turned.

That is why it is so crucial that it is precisely here that the evidence tilts. For when Al-Azami lays the traditions on the table, the prohibition turns out not to be the exceptional and general declaration of the Prophet ﷺ that Goldziher made of it. It is a single, disputed saying of Abu Sa’id al-Khudri ﵁, surrounded by dozens of traditions that command the writing, permit it, or report it as a matter of course. And Abu Sa’id al-Khudri ﵁ himself, the man who stands in the transmission as the principal narrator of the prohibition, later wrote down ahadith with his own hand.

No Arabic scholar of standing, writes Al-Azami, has ever read the prohibition as general and permanent. Ibn Qutaiba ﵀, Ibn al-Athir ﵀, an-Nawawi ﵀, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani ﵀, all treat the tradition within a well-defined context: a temporary precaution to prevent confusion between Quran and Hadith on one and the same sheet, lifted as soon as that precaution was no longer needed. The Prophet ﷺ knew his people. He knew how easily a note in the margin of a Quran fragment could be mistaken for part of the Book itself. That was the problem, and that was the solution.

A People That Learned to Write

To see the permission to write in its proper light, one must first know how the Prophet ﷺ regarded writing in general. Mecca before the Hijra was not the letterless desert the modern reader sometimes imagines. It was a trading city, and trade without bookkeeping does not exist. The caravans to Yemen and to Syria carried contracts, promissory notes, bills of lading. Ka’b ibn Lu’ay, Abu Sufyan, and the houses of Banu Makhzum and Banu Abd Shams kept ledgers set down in written characters. What was rare was not writing, but the wide spread of literacy among ordinary citizens and Bedouin.

What the Prophet ﷺ did, from the first years in Medina onward, was to shift this picture gradually. It was he who sent Mus’ab ibn Umayr ﵁ to Medina well before the Hijra to teach Quran and to teach reading and writing to the young ansar. It was he who, after Badr, offered the Meccan prisoners of war who could not buy their freedom an alternative: whoever taught ten boys of Medina to write was free. Among those young pupils walked a lad by the name of Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁, and he would later become the compiler of the mus’haf of Abu Bakr ﵁.

It was he who permitted that in the mosque, beside the places of prayer, a shelter be raised where the poorest Companions ﵃ could sleep and learn. The Suffa, as it was called, knew Muslims who walked in rags but took up the pen every morning. Abu Hurayra ﵁ was among them. He was the man who would later transmit more hadiths than any other Companion ﵁, and he was also the man who for three years did nothing but listen, store, and fold into his memory what he heard.

This is the background. A Prophet ﷺ who brought his message into a literate city, who extended literacy, who pushed the young toward the writing desk, who would himself never write but who had every new revelation dictated to a Companion ﵁ who could. In that context arises the question that carries our article. Did he permit that his own words too, his own judgments, his own actions, be fixed on leather and on parchment. Or did he draw the line at himself.

The Question of Abdullah Ibn Amr

The boy who would become the central witness in this whole affair was no stranger. Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-As ﵁ was the son of Amr ibn al-As, the later conqueror of Egypt, but he had himself become Muslim earlier than his father. His year of birth is set by Al-Azami, in agreement with the early biographers, at 27 before the Hijra, which made him about thirteen years old at the moment the Prophet ﷺ arrived in Medina. He was literate, unusually versatile, and he knew more than one language: Hebrew he had picked up somewhere in his youth, and later, at the fair of Yarmuk, he would even read aloud from the books of the Ahl al-Kitab.

He had something that was not rare among the young Companions ﵃, but that in him stood especially sharp: a curiosity that knew no rest. He wanted to know everything the Prophet ﷺ said. Not only the revelation, for that was already being written down by others. He wanted the explanation, the conversation, the judgment, the passing remark, the smile followed by a correction, the story behind a story. He understood, young as he was, that all this would one day be over. That the voice would cease to sound, and that whatever had not been fixed by then would hang forever on the hinges of memory.

One day, as Al-Azami relates on the authority of Abu Dawud, ad-Darimi and al-Khatib al-Baghdadi ﵀, he came to the Prophet ﷺ with a question he could no longer carry.

One sentence. Eight words in the Arabic. But in those eight words lies the entire theological foundation of the written Hadith. For note carefully what the Prophet ﷺ permits here. Not merely that a verse of the revelation may be recorded, for that had long been the practice. But that everything that comes from his lips may be written, because everything that comes from his lips is truth. It is a declaration about the nature of the messenger, not only about the nature of the message. It is an acceptance of what would later be revealed in Surah An-Najm, that he does not speak from his own desire but from an inspiration inspired in him.

The Companion ﵁ who sat beside them sometimes presses further in other versions, and points to the objection that circulated in the same circles. That the Prophet ﷺ sometimes spoke in anger, or in a light moment, and that such sayings were perhaps not meant to serve as legal precedent. Abdullah ibn Amr ﵁ heard this, and came back to the Prophet ﷺ to put the question more sharply.

Twice the same permission. Not with a reservation, not with an exception, not with a list of what may and what may not. Write, for by Allah ﷻ, nothing comes out of it but truth. And Abdullah ibn Amr ﵁ wrote.

The book he made bore a name he chose himself and that later became fixed in the transmission: as-Sahifa as-Sadiqa, the Truthful Sheet. He carried it with him. He read from it to whoever wished to hear it. He had his descendants copy it. And he declared, as Al-Azami summarises from the traditions collected in Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀, Sa’d in his Tabaqat, and ad-Darimi ﵀, that there were two things he held to in his life: this Sahifa, and the piece of land the Prophet ﷺ had given him as inheritance. Without that Sahifa, he said somewhere, little would remain of what I have heard from him. The next article in this series will be devoted to this book, for its path through the centuries, via Hammam ibn Munabbih ﵀ in the Sahifa Hammam, into the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀ and into al-Bukhari ﵀, forms a story of its own. Here the scene in which it began suffices. The boy, the Prophet ﷺ, the question, and the one word: write.

The Tradition That Seems to Say the Opposite

Yet there stands in the books of the Hadith, just as well documented, a saying that at first hearing seems to say the opposite. Abu Sa’id al-Khudri ﵁ transmits that the Prophet ﷺ said:

Write nothing from me. Whoever has written down anything from me other than the Quran, let him erase it. Narrate from me, there is no objection in that. And whoever knowingly and deliberately tells a lie about me, let him seek out his place in the Fire.

This is, in the whole Sahih of Muslim ﵀, the one tradition that pronounces the prohibition explicitly. Goldziher chose it as his point of departure. He cited it, he pointed to the transmitted chain, he declared the matter settled. The Prophet ﷺ had forbidden writing, and all that came in the second century was human invention.

Al-Azami does what the orientalist neglected to do. He places the saying back into the library from which it was taken. He counts what stands around it. And as soon as he does that, the picture tilts.

First: Abu Sa’id al-Khudri ﵁, the transmitter himself, wrote down hadiths. This stands in Taqyid al-'Ilm of al-Khatib al-Baghdadi ﵀, on the authority of a chain that goes back to the Companions ﵃ themselves. He was not only permitted, he did it. When students asked him whether they might take notes of his lectures, he refused at first in line with what he had heard from the Prophet ﷺ, but he himself transcribed. When he later learned that Ibn Abbas ﵁ had issued a fatwa approving the writing, he adjusted his position, and said to a student: we shall write it down for you, and then he will be able to withhold these decisions from no one.

Second: the tradition stands isolated. Against this one saying of Abu Sa’id al-Khudri ﵁, Al-Azami registers dozens of traditions that command or permit the writing of Hadith. The command concerning Abu Shah the Yemenite after the conquest sermon of Mecca in 8 AH, when the Prophet ﷺ said: write it down for Abu Shah. The letter on the scabbard of Ali ﵁, of which his son Hasan ﵁ later declared that it was his father’s own handwriting. The booklet of Amr ibn Hazm ﵁ on prayer, ablution, zakat and blood monies, dictated by the Prophet ﷺ himself when he sent him as governor to Najran. The Sahifa of Anas ibn Malik ﵁, who would later recommend to his sons: fix the knowledge with writing, for we do not value the knowledge of one who has not written it down.

Third: the classical scholars never read the saying as a general prohibition. Ibn Qutaiba ﵀ in his Ta’wil Mukhtalif al-Hadith, an-Nawawi ﵀ in his commentary on Sahih Muslim, al-Khatib al-Baghdadi ﵀ in Taqyid al-'Ilm, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani ﵀ in Fath al-Bari, all explain the saying in one of two ways. Either it held for the earliest period, when the revelation was still actively descending and the danger of mingling on one and the same sheet was real, and was later lifted. Or it held for a specific group of Companions ﵃ of whom the Prophet ﷺ knew that they lacked the carefulness to keep Quran and Hadith on separate sheets, while for others, such as Abdullah ibn Amr ﵁, the permission was given expressly.

No classical scholar, writes Al-Azami, has ever claimed that the Prophet ﷺ had permanently and generally forbidden the writing down of his own Sunna. That is an exclusively modern, exclusively Western judgment, built on one hadith taken out of its context, with disregard for all the other testimonies that lie around it.

The Real Reason for the Precaution

What, then, was the real occasion for the saying of Abu Sa’id al-Khudri ﵁? Here the classical scholars, and in their footsteps Al-Azami, have an explanation that is not only logical but is also confirmed by other traditions. It was about mingling.

In the early Meccan period and in the first years in Medina, the revelation was still actively descending. A verse came one morning, a verse followed one evening, sometimes connected, sometimes apart. The Companions ﵃ who wrote, such as Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ and Ubayy ibn Ka’b ﵁ and Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufyan ﵁, had the task of setting the verse exactly in its place and of noting nothing else on that same piece of leather or parchment. When a new pupil, full of enthusiasm, scribbled in the margin of his Quran fragment a word of the Prophet ﷺ as well, about how the verse was to be understood, a danger arose that the Prophet ﷺ saw with crystal clarity. Two generations on, no one would know any longer whether the marginalia were also revelation. The boundaries between Quran and commentary would blur, as they had blurred in other religious traditions when oral explanation was absorbed into the text itself.

The Prophet ﷺ knew the example. He knew the history of the Ahl al-Kitab, and how in their possession of the Scriptures the words of prophets and the words of scholars had grown into one another into an inextricable whole. He knew the sensitivity of his own people to oral style, to sound and cadence. The Quran had to be isolated on the sheet, for the sake of its protected future. No note by any human being, however pious and learned, was to appear on the same fragment.

The prohibition of Abu Sa’id al-Khudri ﵁ refers, according to this classical explanation, not to the writing down of Hadith as such, but to the writing down of Hadith on the same sheet as Quran. Whoever has written down anything from me other than the Quran, let him erase it. The grammatical construction in the Arabic allows both readings, and the context of the other traditions compels the second. Not: write no Hadith. But: write no Hadith where the Quran already stands.

This explains why the tradition was not followed by the same Abu Sa’id al-Khudri ﵁ as a prohibition on transcription. It explains why his colleague Abu Hurayra ﵁ at the same time had ahadith noted down from his dictation by Hammam ibn Munabbih ﵀, by Bashir ibn Nahik, by Aqibah ibn Abi al-Hasna and by dozens of others. It explains why Anas ibn Malik ﵁ encouraged his students to preserve knowledge with the pen, and why Abdullah ibn Amr ﵁ cherished his Sahifa as-Sadiqa as his most valuable possession beside his land. All followed the real instruction. No mingling. Separate scrolls, separate sheets. Quran on its own parchment, Hadith on its own parchment.

At the moment the Prophet ﷺ died and the revelation came to a standstill, the occasion for the precaution fell away. Whatever was written after him was by definition not revelation. The danger of mingling had, after the codification of the mus’haf under Abu Bakr ﵁ and Uthman ﵁, receded for good. That is why, says Al-Azami in his synthesis, after the first generation the whole library of written Hadith opens up without further reserve. The precaution had done its work. The Quran was safe. The Hadith could flow freely on its own parchment.

The Letters of the Prophet

Whoever wishes to see how self-evident writing was in the life of the Prophet ﷺ need only count the letters he had sent out in his time in Medina. Al-Azami refers to the work of Muhammad Hamidullah, Wathaiq Siyasiyyah, in which more than a hundred letters and official documents of the Prophet ﷺ are collected from classical sources. These are not invented later attributions. They are letters to kings, to tribes, to governors, to individual Companions ﵃, with contents that in many cases are confirmed through independent channels.

The letter to Heraclius, the Byzantine emperor, in the seventh year after the Hijra, opened with the bismillah and contained a verse from Surah Aal Imran. The letter to Khusraw II, the Sassanid king, opened with the same formula. The letter to the Negus of Abyssinia, to the Muqawqis of Egypt, to the Banu Tamim, to the Banu Quraiza, to each of the governors he sent out in the last years of his life, bore seal, date of writing and often the phrase: and this letter was written on such and such a day by such and such.

Among those letters one particular category stands out. The documents that did not only cite Quran, but recorded Sunna. A splendid example is the letter to Amr ibn Hazm ﵁, in the later Medinan period, when he was sent as governor to Najran. The document, preserved in its entirety in among others the Sira of Ibn Hisham and in the works of Ibn Tulun, runs to several pages and treats in turn: the times of prayer, the method of wudu, the rules for zakat, the tariffs of blood monies for different kinds of injuries, the rules for the spoils and for the poll tax that the Ahl al-Kitab paid.

This is, unambiguously, Hadith in writing, dictated by the Prophet ﷺ himself. A governor cannot do his work without the detailed explanation of what the revelation has commanded in general terms. Give the zakat says the Quran. Maintain the prayer says the Quran. But how much exactly, at which times, with which movements, all that comes from the Sunna. And the Prophet ﷺ left that Sunna for Amr ibn Hazm ﵁ not in oral instructions, not in general directions, but in a detailed written document.

Comparable written instructions went to Abu Bakr ﵁ in his last year in Medina, for the pronouncing of rules on zakat during the pilgrimage, to Mu’adh ibn Jabal ﵁ when he was sent to Yemen, to Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁ in his campaign in the north. The Prophet ﷺ knew that the oral message, however well conveyed, would not suffice in a land thousands of kilometres from Medina without a written reference. And he had that written reference made.

This undermines every argument for a general prohibition on writing down Hadith. Who could maintain that the Prophet ﷺ would forbid the writing of his sayings in the mosque of Medina, and at the same time, in the same city, have his clerks working on letters that recorded his sayings in detail for dispatch to governors and tribes. The two are not compatible. And if they are not compatible, then one of the two must be misread. It is, as Al-Azami demonstrates step by step, the prohibition that has been misread. The letters do not lie.

The Treaty of Hudaybiyya and the Document to Ali

Two scenes from the life of the Prophet ﷺ show the writing of Hadith so vividly that they deserve their place in any discussion of this question. The first is the Treaty of Hudaybiyya in the sixth year after the Hijra. Quraysh had agreed to a truce, and in the tent of the Prophet ﷺ the document was drawn up. He dictated. Ali ﵁, or in another transmission the young Ibn Mas’ud ﵁, wrote.

When the Prophet ﷺ dictated this is what Muhammad the Messenger of Allah ﷻ has agreed with Suhayl ibn Amr, Suhayl protested. If we acknowledged you as Messenger of Allah, no treaty would be needed. Strike that title. Write only Muhammad ibn Abdullah. The Prophet ﷺ gave the command to Ali ﵁ to erase the words. Ali ﵁ refused out of love, and the Prophet ﷺ took the document himself and erased the lines with his own hand, he who had never learned to read or write. Then he dictated on.

In that scene lies everything that concerns us here. A dictation by the Prophet ﷺ, written down word for word by a Companion ﵁. A negotiation in which every verb counts. A correction, voiced and carried through. A hand of the Prophet ﷺ himself upon the document. No one says: writing down is not allowed. No one says: this is not Quran and so it must remain oral. The self-evidence of writing, the fact that a treaty of state has legal force only on parchment, is doubted by no one.

The second scene is more intimate. Ali ﵁ carried, as Al-Azami takes over from the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀, a small strip of parchment on the scabbard of his sword. On it stood, dictated to him from the hand of the Prophet ﷺ, sayings on the rules of blood monies, on the sanctity of Medina, and on the relations of Muslims among themselves. His son Hasan ﵁ later declared that he had seen this booklet, that it bore his father’s handwriting, and that the contents came directly from the Prophet ﷺ. It is the Sahifa of Ali ﵁, and it is cited in later generations by Abu Juhaifah ﵁, by Tariq ibn Shihab, by Qais ibn Abbad, by al-Harith ibn Suwaid. A network of transmitters spread across the whole Islamic world, all referring to one small document on one scabbard.

What Ali ﵁ did, he did in full view of the mosque. No one reproaches him for it. No one says: you are transgressing the prohibition of the Prophet ﷺ. For the prohibition, as it has stood in the mouth of Goldziher, does not exist in this form. What exists is a precaution to keep Quran and Hadith on separate sheets. What Ali ﵁ has on his scabbard is not Quran. They are words of the Prophet ﷺ on legal rules. Those were allowed to be written down, and they were.

Aisha and the Second Letter

An aspect often overlooked in the discussion of written Hadith is the role of the wives of the Prophet ﷺ. Aisha ﵂ transmits by far the largest number of hadiths of any female Companion ﵂. Al-Azami notes on the authority of al-Khatib in his Taqyid al-'Ilm that she could read, though it is less certain whether she also wrote herself. But that others wrote for her, and that she sent letters with hadiths in them, is established.

Mu’awiya ﵁, caliph in Damascus after the deaths of Umar ﵁ and Uthman ﵁, wrote repeatedly to Aisha ﵂ for confirmations of certain hadiths he could not verify at first hand in Medina. She dictated her answers and sent them to him in written form. Her nephew Urwah ibn az-Zubayr, one of the earliest systematic collectors of Sira and Hadith, did the same. He asked, she answered, he noted it down.

Aisha ﵂ also transmits that in the scabbard of the sword of the Prophet ﷺ, after his death, two letters were found. Kitaban, a dual form that means beyond doubt: two written documents. The contents are given differently in the traditions, but the fact of their existence has been preserved through several channels. On the sword of the Prophet ﷺ, in his own house, written documents with instructions from him lay after his death. Not oral traditions. Documents.

Hafsa ﵂, daughter of Umar ﵁, kept after the first compilation of the mus’haf under Abu Bakr ﵁ the official copy, which she later lent on request to Uthman ﵁ for the making of the definitive codex. This is well known from the history of the Quran compilation. What is less known is that she also kept in her own house hadiths that she, or others on her behalf, had written down. The pattern that emerges is clear. In the most intimate circle around the Prophet ﷺ, his wives, his sons-in-law, his cousins, written documents were present. Not as a covert transgression of a prohibition, but as a self-evident instrument of preservation.

The Scribes of Mecca

When Mecca was conquered in 8 AH, the Prophet ﷺ delivered a speech in the Ka’bah itself. He treated the sanctity of the city, the abolition of the eras of the Jahiliyya, the equality of all Muslims before Allah ﷻ, and a number of legal rules on blood monies and retaliation.

Among the crowd stood a man from Yemen, Abu Shah, who did not want to lose the words of the Prophet ﷺ. He had come from far, he would depart again shortly after, and he knew that his memory was not strong enough to keep the whole speech. He waited until the Prophet ﷺ had finished speaking, and stepped forward.

The command went out to one of the Companions ﵃ present, and the speech was set on parchment and given to Abu Shah to take with him. This is no secret concession to one person, no exception made in silence. It happens openly, in the Ka’bah, in the presence of hundreds of Muslims. The Prophet ﷺ commands the writing down of his own words, for the benefit of a Companion ﵁ who without that writing would have lost them.

It would be improper not to point out the weight of this scene. A command of the Prophet ﷺ to write down his own Hadith, given in the Ka’bah itself, the most sacred point on earth. Who, after this one scene, can still maintain that the Prophet ﷺ would have permanently and generally forbidden the writing down of his sayings. The Ka’bah is no place for unintended concessions. What is said there is law.

The Many Writers Among the Companions

Goldziher had laid one hadith on the table. Al-Azami lays, in the course of his chapter on the writers of the Companion generation, more than fifty on the table in total that explicitly confirm the writing of Hadith. When in later chapters he flows on to the generation of the Successors and the Followers, the number of documents and references rises into the hundreds. We give here only a cross-section, not a complete inventory, for the complete survey would require several articles.

Abu Bakr ﵁ wrote down five hundred ahadith, which he later had erased again, out of concern that he had unknowingly recorded something inaccurately. Ad-Dhahabi ﵀ calls this account itself unreliable and doubts that it ever happened this way. But even the assumption that it did happen this way proves that he did indeed write.

Umar ﵁ considered at a certain moment starting an official collection of the Sunna, and consulted the Companions ﵃ about it. After a month of deliberation he decided to refrain from it, not because he thought writing was forbidden, but because he feared that a state-approved codex might come to stand beside the Quran and might draw attention away from the Quran. A political and pedagogical consideration, not a theological prohibition.

Anas ibn Malik ﵁ noted down the hadiths he had heard from the Prophet ﷺ, read them to him for confirmation, and kept them with him for the rest of his life. He was ten years old when the Prophet ﷺ arrived in Medina, and he served him as personal attendant until his death. Whoever visited him later was shown the books. He said to his sons: knowledge of one who does not write does not count for us as knowledge.

Abu Hurayra ﵁ lived only three years with the Prophet ﷺ, and yet transmitted more hadiths than any other Companion ﵁. How could that be. The answer is in the sources Al-Azami collects: he dictated to dozens of students. Hammam ibn Munabbih ﵀ noted down one hundred and thirty-eight hadiths from his dictation in a Sahifa that has been preserved in its entirety and was published in modern times by Hamidullah. Bashir ibn Nahik and Aqibah ibn Abi al-Hasna each wrote a collection of their own under his supervision. Abd al-Aziz ibn Marwan had almost all his hadiths in writing. Al-A’mash, admittedly of a later generation, wrote down a thousand hadiths from the chain Abu Salih from Abu Hurayra.

Ibn Abbas ﵁, cousin of the Prophet ﷺ, wrote himself, had his slaves write, and dictated to his students. He possessed among other things a copy of the legal decisions of Ali ﵁. When his eyes weakened in later age, his pupils read his own books to him. Some of those books came after his death into the hands of his servant Kuraib, and through him into the hands of Musa ibn Uqba, one of the first systematic Sira writers of the Successor generation.

Ibn Umar ﵁, son of the second caliph, maintained the Sunna of the Prophet ﷺ so precisely that he permitted no change of wording even when the meaning was not altered by it. He possessed the books of his father Umar ﵁, which were read to him by Nafi’. When a man asked him to write down all his hadiths, he answered: that is too much to write down. A remark, writes Al-Azami, that is only logical in the mouth of someone who finds the writing down in itself in no way improper.

Ali ﵁, besides his Sahifa on the scabbard, dictated legal decisions to Ibn Abbas ﵁, to his son Hasan ﵁ and to dozens of others. Hasan ﵁ advised his own sons to write down the hadiths, and himself possessed a book about which the traditions do not entirely agree whether it consisted exclusively of hadiths of his father or also of hadiths of other Companions ﵃.

To this row may be added Abu Ayyub al-Ansari ﵁, who sent ahadith to his nephew; Abu Bakra al-Thaqafi ﵁, who wrote a letter to his son the governor of Sijistan containing hadiths on the administration of justice; Abu Musa al-Ash’ari ﵁, who was admittedly not in favour of writing but who was asked for hadiths by Ibn Abbas ﵁, whereupon he sent them on in written form; Abu Rafi’ ﵁, who had Ibn Abbas ﵁ write about the practices of the Prophet ﷺ; Abd Allah ibn Abi Awfa ﵁, whose servant Salim passed on hadiths in writing on request; Asma’ bint Umais ﵂, who possessed a collection of ahadith; Fatimah ﵂, daughter of the Prophet ﷺ himself, who wrote several hadiths and in her last months received through her father the confirmation of the twofold Mu’arada of the final year.

The list runs on. The careful reader of Studies in Early Hadith Literature walks through hundreds of names, and in each of those names he finds a separate confirmation that in the first generation the writing of Hadith not only occurred, but was widespread and undisputed. Whoever, against this mass, still wishes to stand on one disputed hadith from Abu Sa’id al-Khudri ﵁, does to textual criticism what no judge in a courtroom would allow: one witness against fifty, and the fifty ignored.

The Temporariness of the Precaution

The last element to be clarified in this opening analysis is the chronology. When was the prohibition, in whatever form, issued, and when was it lifted. Al-Azami follows the classical chronology. The precaution of keeping Quran and Hadith on separate sheets dates from the Meccan period and the earliest years in Medina. When the Quran as a whole approached its definitive form and the Companions ﵃ who noted down the revelation in the mosque had gained experience with the strict separation, the necessity of the original precaution gradually fell away.

The uktub hadith of Abdullah ibn Amr ﵁ is placed by most early biographers in the later Medinan period. The decision of the Prophet ﷺ to have the speech written down for Abu Shah dates from 8 AH. The letter to Amr ibn Hazm ﵁ likewise dates from the later Medinan period, in one of the last years of the life of the Prophet ﷺ. The Treaty of Hudaybiyya is from 6 AH. The Sahifa on the scabbard of Ali ﵁ has no fixed dating but is placed by the transmitters in the Medinan period.

In all these cases we know the direction. Not from permission to prohibition, but from precaution to widespread writing. Toward the end of his life the Prophet ﷺ was surrounded by scribes, by dictations, by letters, by treaties, by Sahifas. The silence of six centuries that had been broken in the cave of Hira had not been broken through orally alone. It had also been fixed in ink, verse after verse and command after command.

This is what Al-Azami lays on the table against Goldziher, not as a polemical thrust, but as a methodological restoration of the sources themselves. Read them again. Count them again. Place them in their real order. And you will see that the whole construction the orientalist built on one hadith collapses under the weight of what stands written everywhere around it.

What This Means for the Series

This is, so to speak, the opening move of the whole science of the Hadith. For without the confirmed permission to write down the sayings of the Prophet ﷺ, everything that comes after falls away. Without that permission, the Sahifa of Abdullah ibn Amr ﵁, the Sahifa of Hammam ibn Munabbih ﵀, the book of Anas ibn Malik ﵁, the library of Ibn Abbas ﵁, the legal files of Ali ﵁, the letter of Amr ibn Hazm ﵁, would all have to be products of fraud, carefully fabricated after the fact and inserted into chains of transmission to suggest a practice that never existed. No serious historical methodology can assume such mass fraud without positive proof that it took place. And that positive proof has never been supplied.

If, on the other hand, one accepts what the sources say, another picture opens up. A Prophet ﷺ who in his own lifetime lays the two pillars of preservation: memory and writing. A community that begins from the first day to note down what it hears. A Quran preserved on its own parchment, free from mingling. A Sunna that begins to grow on separate sheets, in dozens of houses at once, from Mecca to Najran, from Medina to Damascus.

In the next article of this series we follow one of those sheets through history. As-Sahifa as-Sadiqa, the Truthful Sheet of Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-As ﵁. We see how he wrote it, how he kept it, how he read from it. We see how his grandson Amr ibn Shu’ayb took it over from him, how in the second and third centuries it was recreated by Hammam ibn Munabbih ﵀ in a Sahifa of his own, how by that route, in the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀ and in the Sahihs of al-Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀, it was finally inherited in its thousands by the whole Islamic world.

But that is for the next article. Here we close with the moment at which the whole edifice was set in motion. A boy, a question, a Prophet ﷺ, a command.

Write. By Him in whose hand my soul is, nothing comes out of it but truth.

The pen went into the ink. The parchment lay spread out. The voice that had begun in the cave of Hira found a second form. No longer only in the heart of whoever listened, but in the hand of whoever wrote. And in that double preservation, in memory and in ink, lies the whole secret of what the centuries thereafter would pass on unscathed of what had been said in Medina.

The Hadith was not invented later. It was, from the command uktub onward, written down. And that writing was not the exception, it was the rule. Goldziher taught otherwise for a century. The sources, patiently reread, teach something else. Whoever makes the writing of Hadith a later invention must first remove the uktub hadith from the record, and with it the Sahifa of Abdullah ibn Amr ﵁, and the document on the scabbard of Ali ﵁, and the letter to Amr ibn Hazm ﵁, and the command concerning Abu Shah, and the dozens of other testimonies. Whoever wishes to follow the orientalist to the end must be prepared to sweep away that whole library. Whoever wishes to honour the sources cannot.

The Truthful Sheet waits in the next article. We shall open it.